I got this email request and thought I’d post the answers publicly since this is a common issue…
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I’m writting to you, because I saw that your’d answered a question very well, so I think you know a lot about Gigapaning.

I’m new in this and I’m having some problems that I will aprecciate your help.

First of all I want to know what can I do in the Stitch Software to create the Gigapan image without the missing photos caused for the use of Autofocus?

Then, I would like to recieve some opinion of what I’ve to do in the case of a stadium full of people, when I shoot to the people is better to have the camera in Autofocus, and when I shoot to the sky put the camera in manual focus?

I’ll aprecciate any kind of advice, thanks for your time.
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Answers…

Dealing with missed images can be quite a hassle I’m finding the best solution is prevention – it is worth the effort in the field to make sure you don’t miss any images (See tips below).

To deal with missed images in the stitcher:
Once you have identified the image that is missing, you can load the image adjacent to it again. It will load at the end of the image list and you drag it to the location you want to use. You can select or mouse over an image to figure out what the file name is. Lately I have been trying very hard to not miss any images because it can make the difference between a quick stitch and hours of annoying work.

A few tricks:

• Always make sure you write down the number of rows/columns when shooting a gigapan. Knowing what size you are trying to reach when you are missing images in the stitcher can save you tons of time.

• Listen to your camera and try to hear when it doesn’t shoot a picture. If you miss one go back and fix it. If you aren’t sure, go back and make sure you got the shot. If you shoot a duplicate image, delete one of them. The cleaner you keep the initial image set the better.

• If you miss a shot, load the previous shot on the camera. Move the gigapan back an image and look through the camera viewfinder and match the shot on the camera with where the camera is. Remember that the gigapan will take the shot it is currently on when you unpause it, so move forward one shot before starting the gigapan again to avoid duplicates. Delete any shots that didn’t look right, were out of focus or repeats. The more you can do in the field the better.

• Change whether the gigapan shoots rows or columns first. To do areas with tons of sky or landscapes with some stuff up close on autofocus, shoot rows from top down. Do the top rows where everything is sky on manual, Do the bottom rows on autosfocus. For example this was done like that: http://gigapan.com/gigapans/75518

• Get to know what your camera will fail on. Keep an eye out for trouble areas and listen to make sure it shoots. Turn off the auto focus if you are coming to a trouble area.

• Usually the camera focuses better if its set to focus using all points in the image but sometimes it might work better with just the center focus point. experiment to see.

• If the camera can almost focus but fails some times, go into the gigapan settings and have it do a longer shutter press

• For shooting people or scenes that are changing a lot, have the gigapan shoot as fast as possible so you get by moving sections quickly.

Remember that, if you have editing software and some time, about 8/9 of the missing image is available on other images. (The standard overlap is about 1/3 top, bottom and sides. If you imagine a 3×3 grid inside your missing image, all but the middle tile will be covered by other images.)